Faster Burners Coming . . .

This is an item easily overlooked, so here it is.

The article says that the appropriate officiating bodies have approved the standards for 12X and 16X dual-layer DVD+R speeds, and 16X burners should become available around the end of the year.

It’s probably not something someone buying a first burner ought to wait for, but for those planning to eventually upgrade a current one, this is something to keep in mind.

The disks themselves have slowly gotten cheaper, but the price in bulk is still hovering around the $1.50 per disk level, as opposed to $0.30-0.40 for 8-16X single-layer disks.

About a hundred million recordable DL disks were sold last year, which may seem like a lot, but is actually less than 2% of the overall recordable DVD market.

The percentages will no doubt shift a bit as DLs get cheaper and DL burning gets faster, but unless DLs end up costing practically the same as single-layer disks, they’ll probably never account for much of the market.

Oddly enough, the real opportunity DLs are likely to become big-time is likely to be: copying high-definition movies. Yes, it sort of defeats the point of HD, but since most people clearly prefer price over premier quality with standard movies; it would be foolish to think they wouldn’t do the same given the chance with HD if the price gap between DL and HD/Blu-ray media was even greater.

No doubt there will be initial difficulties and growing pains, but somehow I suspect they’ll be overcome, and eventually DLs will be what the HD burners will actually end up burning.

Ed


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